How I Actually Read Through Julio Cortazar Blow Up And Other Stories
I bought a used copy of the first English edition in 2014, probably because I was trying to justify reading more fiction outside the anglophone canon. The book is small. It fits in a backpack. What you get inside is ten stories that refuse to behave like normal short fiction, and that refusal is the whole point. The title story, "Blow-Up," comes from the second collection "Final del Juego." The others span both "Bestiario" and that later collection. The 1968 translation by Gregory Rabassa and others is the one most people are reading. It's solid, but it won't save you from misreading Cortázar on first pass.
Julio Cortazar Blow Up And Other Stories reading order and approach
Cortázar doesn't hand you a plot. He hands you a situation and then pulls the floor out from under it. I learned this the hard way with "Casa Tomada." You read it once expecting a story about two siblings keeping a haunted house. Then you realize the house isn't haunted, it's being evacuated. The "them" that invades the house is never specified, and that vagueness is deliberate. The story ends not with horror but with surrender, and the characters walk out of their own home carrying nothing but clothing. I stared at the last page for about ten minutes because I convinced myself I'd missed something. I hadn't. "Bestiario" opens with the title story, which features a woman whose nephew transforms into a rhinoceros. It sounds like a joke premise. It isn't. The transformation happens casually, almost gently, and the family's reaction is muted confusion rather than panic. That tonal decision is what makes the story work. If Cortázar had leaned into the grotesque, it would be one kind of fiction. He leans into the mundane instead, and that's far more unsettling. Reading order matters less than you'd think because these stories are largely self-contained. But I'd suggest starting with "Continuidad de los parques," "Casa Tomada," and "El perseguidor" before you touch anything else. Those three will teach you what Cortázar is doing. The rest will refine it.
I ran into a real problem when I tried to use these stories for a university seminar. Students kept treating every surreal element as symbolic that needed decoding. They wanted to know what the rhinoceros represented, what the tunnels meant, who "them" were in "Casa Tomada." That approach kills the reading. Cortázar isn't writing allegories. He's writing moments where reality simply shifts, and the characters respond with the kind of rationality we apply to everyday disruptions. The workaround I used was to ask students to describe what the characters felt in the moment, not what the story "meant." Emotion first, interpretation second, if at all. "The Pushovers" and "Axolotl" are where Cortázar's structural experiments peak. "Axolotl" is told from the perspective of a man who becomes an axolotl, and the narration never breaks character. The shift happens so gradually that you don't notice you've crossed into a different consciousness until the final lines. It's a technical achievement that most readers miss because they're focused on the surface story. I've seen this story analyzed as a metaphor for alienation. It's also just a very precise piece of narrative engineering. Both readings are valid. Neither captures the whole thing. The story "Blow-Up" itself was adapted into Michelangelo Antonioni's film "L'Avventura," though the film shares almost nothing with the story beyond a photographic premise. This confusion comes up constantly. People assume the story and the film are related in any meaningful way. They're not. The Cortázar story is about a photographer who develops a picture and discovers something impossible in the details. It's shorter, tighter, and far more focused than anyone expects. If you're coming to it through the film, you'll likely find the story underwhelming. If you come to it on its own terms, it's one of the cleanest pieces of speculative fiction in the language.
Get the Full Details
One thing the translations don't fully convey is the rhythm of Cortázar's Spanish. His sentences have a musical quality that English struggles to replicate. Rabassa does admirable work, but there are moments where the prose feels flattened. I've read passages in both languages side by side, and the Spanish versions carry an urgency that the English renders as calm description. This isn't a flaw in the translation, exactly. It's a feature of the medium. The Spanish versions are faster, more percussive. The English versions are more measured. Both work. Neither is the original. If you're teaching or studying these stories, there's a practical issue worth noting. Cortázar's narratives often rely on a single pivot point, a moment where everything recontextualizes. Students tend to look for clues before that moment. There aren't always clues. Sometimes the pivot just arrives, and that's intentional. I tell people to stop hunting for foreshadowing and pay attention to tone shifts instead. A story might feel calm, then suddenly clinical, then suddenly intimate. Those tonal jumps are the signals, not plot details. The collection contains some weaker material alongside the strong work. "Most of Us Have No Time for This" and "The Remainders" are fine but unremarkable. They don't fail, but they don't earn their place the way the better stories do. If you're reading for a course, focus your energy on the nine or ten stories that actually matter and skim the rest. The quality variance is real but not catastrophic.
I returned to this collection years later and found that my initial reactions had been wrong about half of them. "Continuidad de los parques" had struck me as clever but cold. On rereading, it felt like grief dressed as a structural trick. The narrator dies at the end of the story, but you don't notice because the story is about a man reading another story, and the boundary between reader and text collapses. That collapse is the emotional core, not the twist. Cortázar hides the feeling inside a mechanism. That's his method, and it works because the mechanism is so well constructed that you feel something before you understand why. The book is widely available. The Grove Press edition is the standard English version, and it's been in print continuously since 1968. You'll find used copies for under five dollars and new copies around fifteen. The e-book versions exist but the pagination can be unreliable across platforms, which matters if you're citing specific passages. Print or a stable epub is the safer choice.
What Most Readers Get Wrong About This Collection
They treat Cortázar as a magical realist. He isn't. Magical realism presents the supernatural as part of the ordinary world without comment. Cortázar presents disruption as the ordinary world. The difference is subtle but important. In magical realism, the extraordinary is background. In Cortázar, the extraordinary is the inciting incident, and the story examines what happens when people encounter it without having any framework for it. Another common mistake is assuming these stories are about Argentina or Latin America specifically. They're not. Cortázar wrote from France for most of his adult life, and the settings are deliberately unspecified. A Paris apartment, an unnamed house, a generic city. The universality is the point. The stories work precisely because they could happen anywhere. If you want to push further, read "Las babas del diablo," the story that inspired Antonioni's "Blow-Up." It's in this collection, and it's one of Cortázar's most technically accomplished pieces. The narrator is a photographer who witnesses what might be a kidnapping through a window and a telephoto lens. The story is constructed like a film, with cuts and focus shifts built into the prose. It's also one of the few stories in the collection that directly addresses the ethics of observation, which is something Cortázar rarely tackles so explicitly.
The collection closes with "La otra piel," which is quietly devastating and often overlooked. A man receives a letter telling him he has a brother he never knew about, and the letter describes his brother's life in precise detail. The story doesn't confirm whether the letter is real or fabricated. It doesn't need to. The emotional weight comes from the man's reaction, not the mystery. That restraint is characteristic of Cortázar at his best. I still keep this book on my shelf. I haven't read it straight through in years, but I pull it out when I want to remember what fiction can do when it refuses to explain itself. That's the main takeaway, really. These stories don't solve problems. They present situations and let you sit in them. The discomfort you feel afterward isn't a bug. It's the product.
